Three Best Video Games In A Movie Plotlines

Long before it became standard practice to turn every video game into a movie, the video game’s place in a film was more of an object of curiosity then a mere marketing tie-in. In film, the ability to control the GUI (Graphical User Interface) tapped into fears of a machine-dominated world or fantasies of being whisked away to a far off future to save the universe.

I’ve come up with a list of what I considered the best in-movie video games plotlines. If you can add to it, please do.

Wargames (1983)

A high school student whose gaming addiction caused his grades to suffer and like any good gamer, he hacks into his school system to change his marks. Somehow, changing his grades leads him to a super-secret government program that oversees nuke launches. Thinking it’s just RISK Online, he nearly starts World War III due to a poorly-guarded Firewall / gate keeping program.

The Last Starfighter

One of my all time movie favorites

Alex lives in the boonies with nothing to do but get drunk, have sex and play video games. What else does a good game geek do? The trailer-park teen spends his days battling Space Invaders by means of an arcade game. My kind of guy! Little does our hero know, the game is actually an intergalactic recruiting device used to find the best and brightest starfighters for nothing less than saving the universe.

When Alex hits the intergalactic Top Score, there’s no one around to congratulates him. Soon after, an independent contactor for the intergalactic recruiting video machine arrives to enlist him for the purposes of battling the evil Kur and the Ko-Dan armada.

Tron

Definitely one of my top twenty all time favorite movies

Time hasn’t changed too much. The kids of the parents who were scared of their kids getting too sucked up into games are now the parents of the kids who are sucked into today’s games. Tron took the 80’s fear to the literal extreme. The death of in-game characters brings back memories of frustrations and dry tears over the death of characters developed over weeks of game play and the unnatural bonds we formed with them.

Jeff Bridges, gets sucked into his character’s neon-colored game world where he and a security program (the aptly-named Tron) must race bikes, navigate through mazes, and throw discs at square beasts just so that he can escape but to his own world.

More Than Just Fun And Games